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Southwestern Historical Quarterly

More importantly, the text offers new insight into the process whereby thesemaps were created and discusses the impact they had on other maps of theregion until the end of the seventeenth century and beyond. Thus, until explo-ration of the Southwest was renewed, and new maps were drawn from it, maps ofthe initial entradas continued to shape European understanding of the region.Even after the Spanish (and the French) continued this cycle of exploration andmapping in the 168os and 169os, vestiges of earlier maps often appeared onmaps of the eighteenth century. Such oddities are explained and traced back totheir origins by this scholarly work. Moveover, both the Pacific and Gulf Coastsare treated, along with the vast interior lands.Buisseret's contribution focuses on the large-scale early maps of Mexico,wherein we can see the melding of the indigenous and European mapping tradi-tions. Many of these little "picture" maps of towns and districts are artisticallystunning productions and show the wide range of what is possible under the cat-egory of topographical maps, even though the European tradition became dom-inant (and less interesting, visually) as time passed. There is also considerableinformation on the official Spanish mapmaking agency-the Casa deContrataci6n at Seville-and the important geographers who worked in thisagency to record the results of various explorations and update the king's mastermap of the New World. It was this padr6n real, in its evolving stages, that "leaked"to map publishers of other nations and enabled them to issue surprisinglysophisticated maps of America in the first century after Columbus's initial dis-covery of 1492.Readers looking for a well-written, easy to understand, yet carefully document-ed summation of the very early mapping of Texas need look no further. Mappingof the Entradas will stand as a useful guide to this complex subject long after thequincentennial is forgotten.Austin JACKJACKSONArchival Investigations for Mission Nuestra Seiora de los Dolores de los Ais, SanAugustine County, Texas: A Catalog of Documents and Maps of the Mission Doloresde los Ais Historical Materials Collection. By Adin Benavides Jr. (Austin: TexasDepartment of Transportation, Environmental Affairs Division,Archeological Studies Program, Report No. 11, 1998. Pp. xii+252.Illustrations, acknowledgments, abstract, introduction, appendixes, glossary,references. ISBN 0-9660796-3-9, paper.)How remarkable that a community's zeal to promote the historical values ofits Spanish mission site on the colonial Camino Real has generated a researchtool of such impressive scope and quality. With a federal grant administered bythe Texas Department of Transportation, San Augustine has established notonly a visitor center and museum to house archaeological materials from themission site, but a remarkable archive to support interpretation and continuingresearch on the Spanish era of their region.Archivist/historian Adin Benavides, long noted for expertise in the Spanishand Mexican past of Texas, was retained to find and obtain copies of all perti-nent documents and to create a useful guide to the resulting collection at the